RE: FW: reality

From: Gilles HENRI <Gilles.Henri.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1999 12:01:10 +0200

> Russell
>
> Good points and much appreciated. Another idea is that everythingers
>do also believe in reincarnation: It's not impossible, so it occurs. It is
>also true that not all buddhists believe in reincarnation, just as not all
>christians believe in hell.
>

My personal problem with reincarnation is not if it is possible or not : it
is about its very meaning. If identity is not an objective property, it can
not be transferred to a distant being.
You could mean by reincarnation the fact that somebody could " remember "
what really happened to somebody else. Of course this not strictly
impossible : the atoms (or whatever else) that consitute your brain could
by chance adopt such a configuration that corresponds to the memory of
somebody else : but the probability of such a process is extremely low,
probably not higher than macroscopic tunnelling effect, and most probably
it never happened in our world. Unless you can invoke anthropic principle
to show that such events are necessary for mankind to exist? (which is very
doubtful in my sense...)

> A full, deep understanding of physics is equivalent in some ways to the
> Buddhist concept of enlightenment. The idea of self is relinquished. The
> very fabric of reality is seen to be subjective. The absurdity of
> attachments becomes clear.

I agree that MWI (even without computationalist hypothesis) make clear the
absurdity of any attachments, and even of any belief excepted that you
don't really exist! (That's why I find it weird that buddhists can tell
more than that : obey rituals, believe in reincarnation and so on...).
Actually I think that this would arise from any non-religious vision of the
world. However our brain has been made to feel these illusions, and you
cannot so easily avoid to be happy or unhappy! So for me it is more useful
to try to understand the source and the behaviour of our illusions (through
physical laws to describe the material world, and psychology to try to
understand our own mind) than to deny their reality....

Gilles
Received on Fri Jul 23 1999 - 03:16:58 PDT